vastation

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n. A laying waste; waste; depopulation; devastation.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. A laying waste; waste; devastation.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Examples

In London he read two books by Swedenborg, even though he had foresworn reading, and in one of these books he found that what had occurred to him that afternoon was called a vastation, and nothing he ever heard again convinced him that it was not so.

While researching my "Herne the Hunter" Suppressed Transmission, I ran across Henry James, Sr., and his "vastation" at Windsor:Suddenly in a lightning-flash as it were "fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake."

In his early 30s, sitting by the fire after dinner, he suffered from a "vastation" that came upon him suddenly, without preparation; it presented itself to him visually, viscerally, as "some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room."

Once back in New York and then in Albany, where he moved for two years, the victim of the vastation began to correspond with other Swedenborgians, calling his next son, born in 1845, Garth Wilkinson after one of the most enthusiastic of them.

Conservatives have long taken it as self-evident that the press unfavorably distorts the war, which may be the case; but today that country is a vastation, and the unified field theory of media bias has not been altered one jot.

If we go on reading about the puerile wife-swapping, the pubescent sex games, the Marvel Comics Fantastic Four superheroes, and the gratuitous martyrdom, we will gradually come to see our own suburbia as a desert vastation and our own children as Bedouins subsisting on the shifting sand, as refugees from civil war and famine.